San Francisco’s Coworking Growth Offers A Glimmer Of Hope For The City’s Real Estate Market

Despite experts ringing the alarm on San Francisco’s state of real estate, the city’s coworking footprint appears to be an outlier. 

According to WeWork, bookings for its San Francisco locations following Labor Day grew two-thirds compared to 2021.  

Elton Kwok, WeWork Vice President for California and Nevada, said that this spike in demand largely derived from a Salesforce event during that period, but bookings have remained steady in the weeks following. 

“San Francisco continues to be one of our strongest markets in the U.S., showing that people want to come back to the office,” said Kwok. “Our building occupancy for the San Francisco market currently sits at 75 percent as of [second quarter] 2022. We have seen steady growth month over month.”  

Coworking is having a moment across nearly the entire country as businesses seek to find alternative work solutions for a fraction of the cost. 

However, there are two significant differences in today’s coworking Gold Rush and pre-pandemic demand: corporations are taking up a large portion of coworking memberships, and these spaces are expanding their geographical presence to the suburbs. 

For instance, Laurent Dhollande, CEO of coworking and virtual office provider Pacific Workplaces, says that his company’s downtown Oakland office is among the worst performing locations. But those in the suburbs around Sacramento and San Francisco are reaching “full occupancy” status.   

“The whole idea is to be close to where people live as opposed to downtown, because people are not coming back downtown,” said Dhollande. 

While Dhollande believes that city centers and downtown markets will eventually see a rebound, the reality of today is that professionals want to be in close proximity to their workspace, whether that be at home, a coffee shop or a coworking space.